Platitudes of Papua

In 2010, after years working in Aceh, Bobby Anderson was hired to manage the USAID SERASI project in Eastern Indonesia: Sulawesi Tengah, Maluku, Maluku Utara, Papua, and Papua Barat (hereafter referred to as Tanah Papua). Whilst he'd already worked and travelled in the Malukus, Tanah Papua remained a mystery. Like most foreigners, the news of the place wasn’t found in mainstream media. Every so often rumors would emerge on peripheral media outlets and human rights organizations; tales of massacres and large-scale flight and starvation, the latest of a long line of atrocity perpetuated by Indonesian security actors, in a land closed to outsiders. Having worked with the demilitarized remnants of the Free Aceh Movement, and hearing of the murders and abuse the Indonesian military had committed in my previous posting, he had little doubt that Papua would live up to horrifying expectations. And then he went to Tanah Papua. Over the course of the next five years, first with USAID, managing a funding pool for health and education NGOs and community groups, and later, with the World Bank, where he was the only resident representative of that entity in Papua, he traveled and worked widely. What he witnessed was unlike the news reports he had assumed were contemporary in their nature but in actuality were historical. The killings of the late 1970s, and at the end of the “Papuan Spring”, were over. Tanah Papua, like the rest of Indonesia, was distinguished by corruption, but unlike the rest of Indonesia, the corruption there brought entire systems to a standstill. Tanah Papua was awash with money and an entire class of indigenous elites had been co-opted by it. The land was not characterized by some authoritarian system of oppression: it was awash in violence, between husbands and wives, between extended families and between clans, even between rival churches—and this chaos was tolerated by the state, so long as the violence was not directed at the state: when that happened, the responses of an untrained security sector was as one would expect. The state itself, it was apparent, had a coherent natural resource extraction policy, but no coherent policy toward Papuans. So he started writing about the complexity of what I saw in contemporary Tanah Papua, in Inside Indonesia and other outlets. This culminated in his East West Centre publication, “Papua’s Insecurity: State Failure in the Indonesian Periphery.” Nearly four years later, nothing substantive had changed in the lives of ordinary Papuans. Health and education systems in indigenous areas remain in ruins, Papuans are excluded from economic opportunities in a migrant-dominated job market, corruption is as common as it is destructive, and the security sector remains both violent and unaccountable. The civilian government’s development policies remain focused on natural resource extraction through road-building: Papuans remain an afterthought. And shockingly, his writing from back then is still prescient, and in that it joins the previous writing of Richard Chauvel, Yaap Timmer, the forgotten authors of the 1967 UNDP Fund for West Irian development plan, and so on. He's collected these articles, then, in the hope that they may somehow be useful. Bobby Anderson 2020